Wednesday, July 22, 2026
2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Online Livestream
Click here to join the online livestream.

The in-person program is now oversubscribed due to tremendous community interest. To accommodate additional guests, we are pleased to offer a complimentary livestream option for Eliza Rathbone’s lecture. This event is online only and does not provide an in-person ticket. 

Future lectures in the exhibition series will offer livestream access for purchase through online registration.

Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko met and became friends in New York City around 1929. While much has been written about each of them individually, little attention has been given to them as a “close-knit trio” whose lifelong friendship profoundly shaped their work. They also found each other first on Cape Ann and much later in Provincetown. This too has been relatively unremarked in the literature.

Why does retired museum curator Eliza Rathbone, who has organized nearly 60 special exhibitions, want to do another one? Every major loan exhibition is a voyage of discovery, and this one especially so. This exhibition offered an opportunity to explore a story of mentorship that is central to American art and to examine the significance of Cape Ann in the lives of all three artists—an as-yet unexamined chapter that can be most meaningfully told in the setting that inspired them.

Eliza Rathbone has spent over forty years as a museum curator, more than half of them as chief curator of The Phillips Collection. Educated in art history at Smith College, New York University, and the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London, Rathbone assumed her first curatorial position at the age of twenty-eight, when she became assistant curator of twentieth-century art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, after which she moved across town to become associate curator and eventually chief curator of The Phillips Collection. In addition to overseeing the growth and care of the collection and its installation, she researched and organized dozens of special exhibitions and authored accompanying catalogues on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European art, collaborating with major institutions in the United States and abroad. Rathbone’s work has encompassed many artists, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, and Nicolas de Staël as well as Mark Tobey, Susan Rothenberg, Milton Avery, and Mark Rothko. In 2002, she was named a Chevalier (and more recently, an Officer) in the French Order of Arts and Letters. As chief curator emerita of The Phillips Collection, she continues to write and to curate exhibitions.

Image Credit: Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), Untitled (Mark Rothko with Mandolin), c. 1932. Crayon on paper, 12 x 8 1/2 in. Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. © 2026 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.